Some Amazon sellers are reaching out to customers who leave negative reviews on their products, according to a Monday report from the Wall Street Journal. Some sellers have reportedly gone a step further and offered a refund worth more than the original product in return for revising or deleting the bad review.

Contacting a customer outside of Amazon's messaging service violates the terms merchants agree to on the e-commerce giant's platform.

New Yorker Katherine Scott purchased an oil spray bottle for cooking -- sporting a 4.5 star rating average on Amazon -- but when it arrived, the bottle didn't work correctly, the Journal reported. After Scott left a negative review, she reportedly began receiving emails from someone claiming to be with the product's customer service team. The representative offered Scott a full refund and asked if she would delete her negative comments, according to emails reviewed by the Journal.

Amazon told the Journal that the company doesn't share customer emails with third-party sellers.

"Amazon provides a great deal of help content, proactive coaching, warnings and other assistance to sellers to ensure they remain compliant with our clearly stated policies," an Amazon spokesperson told the Journal. "We have clear policies for both reviewers and selling partners that prohibit abuse of our community features, and we suspend, ban and take legal action against those who violate these policies."

CNET has reached out to Amazon for more information.

Fake or "incentivized" reviews are a problem on Amazon, according to a blog post from the company in June. In 2020, the company removed 200 million suspected fake reviews before they could be posted to pages for products listed by one of 1.9 million third-party sellers on the platform, CNET's Laura Hautala reported last month.

Source: CNET

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